IT: Lack of direction, accountability, and empowerment. Zero technical leadership.
Pros
Top-line focus. Revenue driven. The company is in acquisition mode and focused on external growth. This is a good thing, because the mindset of senior leadership becomes "How can we create additional streams of revenue and expand our service portfolio?" -versus the traditional mindset of: "how can we cut corners and eliminate cost?". Unless you are working with some of the largest IT shops in the world, you will not find another company who is as flexible with their IT budgets as this company. There is a lot of opportunity to get hands-on experience with various technology platforms across multiple realms of IT such as networking and server infrastructure.
Cons
The other reviews are spot on. If you want to understand the situation the company is in, read the phoenix project. It's amazing to read the other reviews and see that nothing has changed in almost 2 years. Enablement There is a ton of "opportunity" but a lack of empowerment. The efforts of technical personnel and junior management are regularly undermined by upper management. As mentioned in another review, guidance from senior leadership is nothing more than lip service. A lot of talk but no action. When asked for deliverables, employees are not given what they need to be successful yet held responsible for the negative outcomes and failures. Employees are hired to perform specific job functions and produce results -but are not enabled to perform those functions either due to lack of trust from management or because they are constantly putting out fires. This comes from a lack of technical understanding and expertise from leadership. I'm sorry, if you have not served in a technical capacity for the last 5 years, you are no longer technical. This creates a HUGE bottleneck which effectively undermines every progressive effort that the employees make. They do not approve projects, changes, and budget requests because they simply do not understand the technology. The company does not leverage the talent and expertise that they spend so much time and effort trying to recruit, so the talent becomes burnt out from lack of empowerment. Lack of Direction Pick 4 people from all 4 corners of the IT department floor and ask them what the next main technical objective for the department is. They will either give you different answers, or have no clue what you are talking about. I have never worked with a more disconnected department. Yet, ask the same 4 people what their biggest challenges and problems are, and they will ALL give you the same answer. There is quadruple redundancy and overlap from an operational perspective. Redundant managers and duplicate leadership positions make for some serious alignment issues. As an employee or junior leader, you may find yourself answering to 4 different individuals with 4 completely different directives. Lack of Accountability ITIL and RISE shop, but you wouldn't know from the outside looking in. Change management is laughable. Risk, compliance, and technical leadership are completely absent from change management and approval boards. Nothing is scrutinized and changes are often blindly approved with no thorough understanding of risk or how change processes might affect other business units. Lack of standardized methods of procedure, accountability processes, and systems -create dozens of weekly outages and incidents that severely inhibit the company's ability to make progressive steps in the right direction. The service management platform is fundamentally flawed and all suggestions for improvement are ignored. Zero Technical Leadership Again, the lack of technical expertise at the middle and senior management levels is probably the company's biggest source of directional convolution. Known Zero-day vulnerabilities are left un-patched for months, over-used and exhausted hardware platforms are left in place, and critical bug-fixes are left unapplied because management fails to understand the severity of such issues. SDLC should be sufficient to justify regularly refreshing hardware and software patches -versus creating a 20 slide power point deck to explain why we need to apply a critical fix. Basic high-availability concepts such as N+1 and general redundancy are also greek. Management often times has no idea what is going on beneath them and how bad the problems really are because they simply do not understand the technology. If you truly care about your job, performance, and career, this place will suck the life out of you. You may come here expecting to make a difference but you won't until things change.
